Why The Fork?

God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks—his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating.

European dining before forks was a messy, finger-licking, stab-happy affair.  The most common eating utensil was the knife, used to cut and spear meat.  Everything you didn't spear with your knife-point, you ate with your fingers.

These knives had a troubling habit of being used in knife fights, finding their way into kidneys and other people's faces.  This actually is the reason for the popularity of chopsticks.  Confucius himself said:

The honorable and upright man keeps well away from both the slaughterhouse and the kitchen. And he allows no knives on his table.

Which makes sense if you want to reduce the number of dinnertime stabbings.

The fork was first used in the classical Mediterranean world, but not to transfer food from plate to mouth.  Instead forks were used to hold meat down while it was being carved.  The good Greeks and Romans ate with their hands, like any other sensible person would.

The practice of eating at the table with forks came, like so many other things, from the East.  Around the 7th Century people in the Middle East and Byzantine Empire started to use forks at the dinner table so that eating wouldn't leave their fingers covered in spittle and sauce, and by the 10th Century forks were common on the wealthy table of the East.

So it makes sense that at the turn of the 11th Century, when a son of the Doge of Venice married Byzantine Princess Maria Argyropoulina, the bride-to-be would bring in her luggage a set of golden forks.  She proceeded to eat with these peculiar pronged things during the wedding feast, scandalizing proper Venetian society.  Because, you know, why not use your fingers like everyone else?

The scorn of proper Venetian society quickly turned to schadenfreude when the Princess died of the plague two years later.  Could her overly delicate fork-use have anything to do with it?  Saint Peter Daiman certainly thought so.

Nor did she deign to touch her food with her fingers, but would command her eunuchs to cut it up into small pieces, which she would impale on a certain golden instrument with two prongs and thus carry to her mouth. . . . this woman’s vanity was hateful to Almighty God; and so, unmistakably, did He take his revenge. For He raised over her the sword of His divine justice, so that her whole body did putrefy and all her limbs began to wither.

A fitting demise for such an affected princess.

Even though forks seemed to carry the promise of death-by-plague, they became popular in Italy. The history of the fork in Europe now becomes a story of intrepid travelers foisting the new convenience on an unwilling society.  Catherine de Medici went from Italy to France to Marry Henri the Second she brought forks.  Along with the entire concept of what we now call French cooking.

The first person to bring forks to England was a traveller named Thomas Coryat who had walked his way through much of Europe and picked up the habit of using forks in Italy.  For bringing his own forks back home he was lambasted, mocked, and given the nickname furcifer by his friends--a pun on the word fork, and also someone doomed to hang.

But the fork was now in England, and it would not be ignored so easily.  In Shakespeare's time, the fork was used by dandies and the rich to mark just how different they were from the common rabble.  Look, they said, with their gilded, crystal-studded, bejeweled eating utensils--I don't have to stick my fingers in my mouth when I eat.  I am using a fork.  Which you cannot afford.

I was inspired to write this post by the Shakespeare's Restless World episode Snacking Through Shakespeare.  My main source was the fantastically detailed post The Uncommon Origins of the Common fork on Leite's Culinaria.

Five Surprisingly Cool Clocks

Clocks must be one of the most ho-hum pieces of technology in our modern techno-overwhelmed world.  So cheap that they are absolutely everywhere.  So everywhere that we forget they even exist.  But clocks used to be fantastically precious pieces of high technology, the culmination of all the mechanical genius of their time.

Today we'll be looking at five clocks that will remind you how cool telling the time actually is.

Drip Drop Instead Of Tick Tock

Time-keeping started when people watched the progress of shadows on the ground.  It just makes sense.  Should be easy.  Okay!  Blog post finished guys, everyone go home!

Except there's a problem with solar clocks.  Let's say that you want a particular event (religious ritual; bacchanal) to last the same amount of time every single day.  You stick a pole in the ground and mark the shadow cast at the beginning of the event, and then mark the shadow cast at the end of the event.  The next day you just start when the shadow hits the first mark, and finish when the shadow hits the second mark.  Problem solved, right?

Wrong.  You're forgetting that the sun rises and sets at a slightly different time every day, so the positions of those shadows will change as the year does its always going forward thing.

The water clock is an ingeniously simple solution to this problem.  Here's how it works:

• Take a basin.
• Puncture a hole in said basin.
• Fill Mr. Basin with water.
• Stick a measuring stick in the water.
• Wait.
• There you go.

The earliest water clock was found in the tomb of Pharoh Amenhotep back in 1500 B.C--it's the big jug thing pictured above.  But the water clock continued to be a useful way of keeping time for another three thousand years.

The water clock reached its finest expression in the Muslim scholar al-Jazari's book called Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices published in the beginning of the 13th Century.  In this tome al-Jazari describes the Castle Clock, a water-powered clock which had so many special features it was like a 12th Century Casio.  Not only did it show the time.  Not only could you reprogram the length of the hours to account for the changing seasons.  Not only did it show the position of the zodiac.  Not only did it reveal one of five musical mannequins every hour.  But the thing had two falcon robots that would drop a ball into a vase.  Take that, iPod.

Smells Like Turmeric--Must Be Two O'Clock

Of course, no matter how advanced your timepiece is, you're not going to be able to actually tell the time unless you can see the timepiece.  This was a problem during that long era before light-switches.  If you happened to want to know what time it was at night, you had a problem.

But for every problem there's a solution.  The genius of nocturnal time-keeping was enterprising French inventor called M. de Villayer, who created a spice clock.  The hour hand of the clock would point to a bowl of spices--a different one for every hour.  You followed the hour hand with your own hand, dipped a finger in the appropriate bowl, and literally tasted the correct time.

But like all great European inventions, this one was anticipated in the east by a good number of centuries.  Starting in the 10th Century the Chinese made incense clocks like the one pictured above.  These held specially calibrated sticks of incense known to burn at a particular rate.  The first hour would smell of sandalwood, for instance, and the next of cinnamon.  Instead of a sideways glance at your wrist-watch all you needed to do to tell the time was sniff.

Too Useful For You?

The clocks we've seen today are all built on a human scale.  If I know anything about my decadent readers it's that you want something a little bit more impractical.  Well our final clock is so lacking in applications, so abstract in conception, that it must stand either as one of the coolest things on earth--or one of the dumbest.  Or both.

Buried deep in a mountain in Texas, the 10,000 Year Clock will tick at the speed of continents drifting. It will tick once a year for ten-thousand years.  Why?  The short answer:  because.

Mock all you want, but I find the long answer is inspiring.  Our lives--everything that we ever will know and feel, every terror and every heartbreak, all the love and all the trouble, the sum of this incredibly important biological lump I call me--it comes to only an instant in the turning of the universe.  We are here, we proudly beat our chests--and then we are gone.  And it's staggering to think of how much time there has been before us, and how much time will indifferently move on after we are gone.  Around us the stars grind on, the arms of our galaxy slowly spin, our planet changes--and to those slow movements, does a me or a you really amount to much?  The 10,000 Year Clock stands for me as a metaphor for one of mankind's greatest virtue:  our ability to step up on our tippy-toes and look beyond our cramped perspective, seeing what lies beyond--the proud mountains washed away by ten thousand years of rain, the lakes dried by a hundred years of sun--the ape evolve into a man.

This post was inspired by the In Our Time episode on the Measurement of Time, which might be one of the finest forty minutes of erudite discussion I have ever had the pleasure of listening to.

A note:  surprisingly little documentation exists about the spice clock.  The only source I could find of it is a book by Carlo Cipolla called Clocks and Culture.  Check it out if you are interested.